Vive la Différence

Here’s William Hogarth, laugh-aloud funny; sly; satirical; sharply observant, and technically brilliant. In a slightly baggy, but also wonderfully massive exhibition, Tate Britain’s new show, Hogarth and Europe, has more than 60 Hogarths (paintings and prints) and a similar number by European contemporaries. Some highlights haven’t been seen here for decades, such as Hogarth’s superb portrait of independent Miss Mary Edwards (1742) who owned many of his works. In sultry crimson silk, diamonds and pearls, she is regally surrounded by clear signs of her wealth and power, including a portrait bust of Elizabeth I.

William Hogarth: Miss Mary Edwards, 1742. The Frick Collection, New York, photo: Joe Coscia Jr.

While the show would stand just as a fresh take on Hogarth, its stated aim is larger. The poster subtitle calls it “Uncovering City Life”; an info-panel says it is to explore “the many ways his art connected with the outside world”, and the catalogue says the aim is to “expose parallels, continuities, connections and contrasts.” Take your pick.

In the early and mid-18th century, Europe was expanding rapidly, with growing capital cities of which London was the biggest. Trade boomed, especially in imported porcelain, furniture, spices, coffee, tobacco and sugar, creating sources of pleasure as well as new subjects to paint. Conversation pieces featured the taking of tea or coffee while showing off fancy interiors and cosmopolitan possessions. The printing trade flourished, making these great cities thriving centres for books and prints. Artists travelled from city to city for work as well as pleasure. Cross-cultural influences were wide, and painters met, as well as seeing each other’s work via engravings. Hogarth went to Paris twice (only to be mistakenly arrested as a spy on return from his second, 1748, trip). Four stupendous maps, of London, Paris, Amsterdam and Venice, ground the works on show. Jean Rocque and John Pine’s famous 1746 map of London, printed on 24 sheets, covers 13 x six feet. Rocque was a Huguenot immigrant. The plan of Amsterdam, prettily like an open fan, is also wonderful.

 There’s fun to be had in looking at who influenced whom, as well as noting the subtle differences in the way that artists from say Paris or Amsterdam present public and private life. From all countries come scenes of punch-drunk men and sometimes women behaving badly: this theme crosses all borders. There’s no doubt that Hogarth, internationally known from his engraved A Harlot’s Progress series of 1732, influenced painters such as Cornelis Troost (fondly known as the Dutch Hogarth), while others simply copied his work. A version of Hogarth’s hilariously boozy, popular A Midnight Modern Conversation (1732) by an unknown painter faithfully presents the skew-whiff wigs on drunk men clustered round a porcelain punch bowl. Versions of this picture were even put on to imported Chinese punch bowls (there are two such big beauties on show; a nice touch).

Unknown artist after William Hogarth: A Midnight Modern Conversation c.1732. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

In return, Hogarth was clearly influenced by continental painters, through prints, or by meeting. Many lived and worked for spells in London — among them, Venetian Canaletto (who painted Vauxhall pleasure gardens and the Ranelagh Rotunda); Venetian Jacopo Amigoni, and Frenchman Jean-Etienne Liotard. When Hogarth visited Paris he met Jean-Siméon Chardin, whose uncharacteristically amusing picture of a masked monkey painting at an easel is not here (but is in the catalogue). A few years later, around 1757, Hogarth produced a Self Portrait Painting the Comic Muse, which deliberately apes Chardin’s picture. The man who couldn’t help mocking others, whether preachers, soldiers, drunkards, fops or fools, was also perfectly able to mock himself. It’s a big part of the reason that we love him.

Two side-by-side portraits point up this cross-fertilisation. Cornelis Troost’s 1739 Self-portrait shows Troost in a magnificent gilded trompe-l’oeil oval frame, swagged by a silk curtain, resting on a fine stone balustrade in front of a wall of costly marble. On the balustrade rests his palette on which real blobs of paint glisten. He is formally dressed, formally posed, and fulsomely wigged: a gentleman. He shows off his prestige as he shows off his wares (though don’t be over-beguiled by that sweet face and faraway look, for this is the same artist whose large picture Misled: The Ambassador of the Rascals Exposes Himself (1739) shows a man mooning out of a window, a smile painted on his buttocks; a marvellously funny and very Hogarthian — indeed, Chaucerian — street scene.) In riposte, in 1745 Hogarth produced The Painter and his Pug. Again in a trompe oval frame — though much plainer. But Hogarth’s frame totters on a pile of books as if to say, I am supported by brains, not the establishment. His smaller palette has no paint on it, just a serpentine line, expressing perhaps the importance of the idea over the mere mechanics of painting; while instead of formal clothes he wears an informal wrapping gown and fur-trimmed, tasselled cap. If there was ever an example of deliberate English casualness mocking foreign formality, this is it. Though again don’t be fooled, because Hogarth first rendered himself in a coat just as formal as Troost’s, before going for this apparent devil-may-care look. He weighed up every ounce of his paintings.

Cornelis Troost: Self-portrait 1739. Rijksmuseum. Purchased with the support of the Verniging Rembrandt and the Stichting tot Bevordering van de Belangen van het Rijksmuseum

William Hogarth: The Painter and his Pug, 1745. Tate

There are plenty of treats in store, from French painter Etienne Jeaurat’s Arrest by the Watch (1743), a very Hogarthian image where a French soldier apparently inadvertently gropes a woman’s breast; or two versions of The Flea by Guiseppe Maria Crespi, where a woman diligently scours her chemise for fleas. And towards the end comes this: a vast, little known painting by an unidentified French painter, showing a bucolic drinking scene that, after all the sprawling, vomiting, riotous scenes before, takes one’s breath away. Partly for being so luminous and highly coloured in a show where a lot of pictures are a trifle on the gravy register, but also for the elegance of its participants. Aristocrats in silk and velvet, each as young and silky as the peaches and pomegranates they leave on the plate in order to drink faster from pretty little glasses, not a hair out of place. Two of the young men appear about to kiss each other in a mesmerising maybe moment. In most (not all) of the French and Italian pictures, drinking and strolling and lovemaking are often done more elegantly than in Hogarth’s pictures. This is an exhibition of similarities as well as differences, and even though the line of argument isn’t quite as strong as the line of wit and beauty, don’t miss it.

Unknown artist, French School: The Hunting Lunch, 1715. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Orléans

HOGARTH AND EUROPE

3 November 2021 – 20 March 2022, Tate Britain. tate.org.uk

Main picture caption: William Hogarth: Marriage a la Mode, The Tête a Tête, c. 1743. The National Gallery London

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